Re: [-empyre-] interactive video as error

[Barbara Lattanzi <threads@wildernesspuppets.net>]

Alan,

At 04:13 PM 3/14/2005, you wrote:

> I don't see why performativity and/or intentionality depends on error, or 
> how error is equivalent to misrecognition or mismatch. Performativity as I 
> understand it references statements that themselves are actants, as in 
> taking an oath or possibility interjections.

Please excuse, then, my error.  Since I had every intention of my statement 
being correct...

either that, or else I had the intention of finally finding (performing) 
some position that someone else in this discussion could address.

> It also references _any computer command, from clicking a link to typing 
> and hitting return on 'date' in a terminal window.
> Likewise interactive video is a discursive field with perhaps live 
> performance near one 'node' and the standard network newscast near another.
> There are any number of possibilities. As pointed out, even live audience 
> participation is a form of performativity for more than the 
> performer/creator his/her self. It's always a wager.

a serious question... a wager of what?  that the audience will perform 
badly?  what is the criteria for such a characterisation if "there are any 
number of possibilities"?

> Re: Virtual - I'm nervous about posting here,
> but I think there are issues relatively important at stake. I find the 
> concept of tremendous use,

I could respond, "...as I do, the concept of error", since I make them so 
often that I feel close to the concept as a lived idea.

> and can point to for example Merlin Donald's work on external mind as a 
> good example. One can deconstruct constantly, but there's a basic (not 
> essen- tial) difference between an equivalent avatar in Poser and 
> being-in-the- world a la say Merleau-Ponty or Alfred Schutz. The 
> difference however isn't technologically-based; Tibetan 'ghost traps' or 
> kami-residentces in Shinto Shrines also embody the virtual. It's the 
> liminal that's fascina- ting here

yes, I so much agree... and I appreciate how generous you are in the 
variety  of references that you are using to make your point.

> - something that Talan Memmott has worked on extensively - the distance 
> between screen and participant - a skein of projectivity / introjectivity 
> (since there are other loops as well I use the term 'jectivity' to 
> reference this entanglement), that works within an uncanny among 
> real/virtual/physical-material/representation and so forth. Most of my own 
> work's in this area; I certainly see Talan's as well here.
>
> It's very unclear to me that the Furtherfield Studio is 'closed.'

I am thinking of TAZ.  And how that kind of cloistering space does not 
depend on reference to its outside (which is nonetheless part of it, e.g., 
the software and other contextual aspects of its apparatus), is filled with 
productive ambiguities and, just like you say, with surprises.

I have nothing against the Furtherfiled studio!  It is remarkable!   I am 
just trying to characterise an alternate route for thinking about 
interactive video that reckons with the audience in a way that "provokes" 
an exchange of values.

Barbara



> It's 'closed' the way any venue is, even the Agora. But anyone may enter 
> and participate, and when I've been in/on/within it, it's been full of 
> surprises - just like IRC, newgroups, etc., all equally open and closed.
>
> - Alan